What if? Loaded with wistful regret and dashed dreams, it’s a question that can’t be pushed entirely aside as the hard-headed analyses trickle into Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson’s review of federal Labor’s shock election loss in May.

After all, it’s a question that still occupies half the nation. Had Labor triumphed and kept to even a portion of its platform, Australia’s future would look rather different. Aboriginal people in the north could have contemplated the end of demeaning work-for-the-dole tasks, like collecting litter. There’d be some prospect of affordable dental treatment. The future would be slightly less unequal, as the new government began to claw back redistributions favouring the wealthy. And Australia might have eventually been something other than the crony-capitalist global climate pariah it is now.

Or so we’re told. The reality is that Labor’s confusion over climate policy and specific polluting projects did not begin as the promised swings failed to materialise during the evening of May 18. For the whole campaign Labor was notoriously “on the fence” regarding the Adani coalmine, a project that any party committed to emissions-reduction goals would immediately reject.

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles is set to deliver a speech this evening that is unlikely to clear anything up. The senior member of Victoria’s Right faction will reportedly tell the John Curtin Research Centre that his party lost voters by offering blue-collar workers “handouts rather than hope” when it “agonised over every word during press conferences on what at its heart was the business case of a private mining venture”. The contradictions inherent in Marles’s analysis reflect Victorian Labor’s secret submission to Weatherill and Emerson’s inquiry, which apparently advocated for greater policy devolution to state branches. Just what this would have meant for the party’s position on Adani is unclear, especially given Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s rush to approve the mine following the federal election loss.

With its historical, ideological and organisational roots in the labour movement, Labor will always be vulnerable to the accusation that it isn’t prioritising jobs enough. And mining jobs, even when comparatively few, are apparently worth more than tourism industry, renewable energy and even pastoral jobs, no doubt owing to the respective union coverage rates of those industries and to views held within the most powerful unions, namely the Australian Workers’ Union and the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union. Although there remains spirited disagreement within them, the unions of our time are a long way from delivering any green bans.

It’s difficult to find any sustained analysis of class, capital and the state in Australia’s unions, or in the parliamentary party with which most of them remain affiliated. Labor’s democratic-socialist objective remains in its constitution, but in practice informs little of its social analysis and few of its policies.

As a result, Labor is perennially unable to articulate to itself – let alone to unions, or to voters – why aligning itself entirely with the interests of a major coalmine in the vicinity of the Great Barrier Reef operated by a multinational with a disturbing labour rights record might not be such a great idea. Opposition agriculture and resources spokesperson Joel Fitzgibbon wants his party to stop fighting these battles at all, advocating yesterday for Labor to admit defeat and simply adopt the Coalition’s emissions targets.

As the Climate Accountability Institute this week names the 20 fossil-fuel companies that together are responsible for a full third of global carbon emissions, and Greg Jericho reminds us that nobody under the age of 34 has ever experienced a month of below-average temperatures, the question to ask is whether Labor can ever be part of the solution to this most wicked and most catastrophic of all problems.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison shows few signs of reconsidering his tight foreign-policy relationship with US president Donald Trump anytime soon, even as US troops withdraw from northern Syria to make way for invading Turkish forces.

“With a furore raging over the propensity of violent comics to corrupt children, creator of the Lone Avenger Len Lawson reassured readers that his work ‘always featured stories of the Crime-does-not-pay kind’. Yet, within a year, Action Comic had indeed been censored, less because of its contents than as a response to Lawson’s own extraordinary depravity.”

“As the conversation between Western psychiatric professionals and Anangu traditional healers evolved, it became apparent that there was little common language with which to talk about mental-health issues. Interpreters had been employed all along, but as the questions became more specific the interpreters struggled to find the words to frame them or the answers when they came. In 2012, a small grant was sourced to run a project that focused on words for various states of mind, and Uti Kulintjaku was born.

“Prime ministers do their best to hide it, but the fact is governing involves mostly flying by the seat of your pants. And this is particularly true for the Morrison administration, now into its sixth month after its surprise election win. It is scrambling to persuade the nation it really knows what it is on about and how it will achieve it. The drought and a stubbornly sluggish economy aren’t helping. Nor is Morrison’s new best mate, Donald Trump.”

Russell Marks is a lawyer and an honorary research associate at La Trobe University. He is the author of Crime and Punishment: Offenders and Victims in a Broken Justice System (Black Inc., 2015).

What if? Loaded with wistful regret and dashed dreams, it’s a question that can’t be pushed entirely aside as the hard-headed analyses trickle into Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson’s review of federal Labor’s shock election loss in May.

After all, it’s a question that still occupies half the nation. Had Labor triumphed and kept to even a portion of its platform, Australia’s future would look rather different. Aboriginal people in the north could have contemplated the end of demeaning work-for-the-dole tasks, like collecting litter. There’d be some prospect of affordable dental treatment. The future would be slightly less unequal, as the new government began to claw back redistributions favouring the wealthy. And Australia might have eventually been something other than the crony-capitalist global climate pariah it is now.